Warlord 2 Enemy of God by Bernard Cornwell Read Free Book Online

shoulders. ‘You have seen the Dark Road, Derfel,’ she whispered, ‘you have seen the Dark Road.’ And suddenly she pulled away from me and the cloak was whipped from my back and I fell forward onto Dolforwyn’s wet grass as the wind swirled cold about me. I lay there for long minutes. The dream had passed and I wondered what the Dark Road had to do with my soul’s desire. Then I jerked aside and vomited, and after that my head felt clear again and I could see the fallen silver cup beside me. I picked it up, rocked back onto my haunches and saw that Merlin was watching me from the far side of the royal stone. Nimue, his lover and priestess, was beside him, her thin body swathed in a vast black cloak, her black hair held in a ribbon and her golden eye shining in the moonlight. The eye in that socket had been prised out by Gundleus, and for that injury he had paid a thousandfold.
    Neither spoke, but just watched as I spat the last vomit from my mouth, cuffed at my lips, shook my head, then tried to stand. My body was still weak, or else my skull was still reeling, for I could not raise myself and so, instead, I knelt beside the stone and leaned on my elbows. Small spasms still made me twitch from time to time. ‘What did you make me drink?’ I asked, putting the silver cup back on the rock.
    ‘I made you drink nothing,’ Merlin answered. ‘You drank of your own free will, Derfel, just as you came here of your own free will.’ His voice, that had been so mischievous in Cuneglas’s hall, was now cold and distant. ‘What did you see?’
    ‘The Dark Road,’ I answered obediently.
    ‘It lies there,’ Merlin said, and pointed north into the night.
    ‘And the ghoul?’ I asked.
    ‘Is Diwrnach,’ he said.
    I closed my eyes for I knew now what he wanted. ‘And the island,’ I said, opening my eyes again, ‘is Ynys Mon?’
    ‘Yes,’ Merlin said. ‘The blessed isle.’
    Before the Romans came and before the Saxons were even dreamed of, Britain was ruled by the Gods and the Gods spoke to us from Ynys Mon, but the island had been ravaged by the Romans who had cut down its oaks, destroyed its sacred groves and slaughtered its guardian Druids. That Black Year had occurred more than four hundred years before this night, yet Ynys Mon was still sacred to the few Druids who, like Merlin, tried to restore the Gods to Britain. But now the blessed island was a part of the kingdom of Lleyn, and Lleyn was ruled by Diwrnach, the most terrible of all the Irish Kings who had crossed the Irish Sea to take British land. Diwrnach was said to paint his shields with human blood. There was no King in all Britain more cruel or more feared, and it was only the mountains that hemmed him in and the smallness of his army that kept him from spreading his terror south through Gwynedd. Diwrnach was a beast that could not be killed; a creature that lurked at the dark edge of Britain and, by common consent, he was best left unprovoked. ‘You want me,’ I said to Merlin, ‘to go to Ynys Mon?’
    ‘I want you to come with us to Ynys Mon,’ he said, indicating Nimue, ‘with us and a virgin.’
    ‘A virgin?’ I asked.
    ‘Because only a virgin, Derfel, can find the Cauldron of Clyddno Eiddyn. And none of us, I think, qualifies,’ he added the last words sarcastically.
    ‘And the Cauldron,’ I said slowly, ‘is on Ynys Mon.’ Merlin nodded and I shuddered to think of such an errand. The Cauldron of Clyddno Eiddyn was one of the thirteen magical Treasures of Britain that had been dispersed when the Romans had laid waste Ynys Mon, and Merlin’s final ambition of his long life was to reassemble the Treasures, but the Cauldron was his real prize. With the Cauldron, he claimed, he could control the Gods and destroy the Christians, and that was why, with a bitter tasting mouth and a belly rank with sourness, I was kneeling on a wet hilltop in Powys. ‘My job,’ I said to Merlin, ‘is to fight the Saxons.’
    ‘Fool!’ Merlin snapped.